8 Ways Climate Change Isn't Messing Around

7. "But It's Happened Before..."

Something that a lot of people point out when we talk about climate change is the fact that the Earth naturally goes through periods of warming and cooling.

This is largely due to these things called Milankovitch Cycles which refer to the variations on the Earth's orbit around the sun. Changes in the eccentricity of the orbit and the "wobble" of the Earth's axial tilt can mean that the sun's energy can be more or less intense on the Earth's surface over time, causing natural phases of warming and cooling.

Cool, all true, just a couple of things:

(a) These happen over the course of, like, 13,000 years.

(b) We are currently supposed to be in a cooling period and yet over the last 100 years the temperatures have spiked to a point that they have negated something like the last 6,000 years of cooling (those involved in the Hockey Stick Controversy have sufficiently muddied the statistical waters, but there is a spike).

(c) If we were to fully experience one of these cycles, it would still be a total f**king disaster.

You know when we talk about mass extinctions due to climate change? Yeah, that.

The global changes in temperature have wiped out vast swathes of the creatures that have walked the Earth. The extinction of the mammoths may seem like a dim, perhaps even whimsical, distant past, but you can be damn sure the mammoths weren't too happy about it.

So lets take a look at just a couple of things that would make life on Earth very f**king unpleasant for humans.